There have been some allegations that the Administration was warned of the 9/11 hijacks…but failed to act to prevent them. I’d be very disappointed were this true, and I can’t believe it is true. Just as I can’t believe the allegations that Roosevelt knew of an immanent attact on Pearl Harbor befiore 12/7/1941.
What does confound me is how 4 airliners could be hijacked and flown for some time without ANYONE having apparently been allerted to the fact that these planes were hijacked, until AFTER they had crashed. How is it possible that 4 flight crews were unable to alert ground control of their situation. Don’t flight crews have some sort of “panic button” to push in such events…like the silent alarms that tellers have in case they are being robbed?
If not, why not? And if they didn’t have them before 9/11, they should certainly have them now. Well, do they?
Actually, your post is a very good example of how stories, or more accurately the perception of stories changes the reality and thus spawn other threads and opinions based not on “fact” but misperceptions.
As I understand things, the Bush Administration is accused of knowing that terrorists were capable of 1) hijacking airliners, 2) hijacking airliners and blowing them up, 3) hijacking airliners and crashing them into government buildings, but not prior knowledge of hijacking airliners and crashing them into the WTC, the Pentagon and potentially the White House and the US Capitol with respect to the actual events of 9/11 .
(There is a story based upon one FBI agent’s speculation involving hijacking an airliner and crashing it into the WTC, and that this agent’s written report never made it up the food chain for further analysis. This is a far cry from Bush actually having prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.)
Your perception is also incorrect that no one knew of the hijackings until after the 9/11 aircraft had crashed. This is not the case. Air traffic controllers speculated and/or knew of the hijackings within minutes because they saw the aircraft change course on their radar screens. What they did not know at the time was the true intent of the changing directions of each aircraft until several minutes too late. Of course, the aircraft which crashed in Pennsylvania was already known to have been hijacked and the potential intent to crash it somewhere in the DC area. After all, fighter jets had been scrambled, and there is evidence that decision-making was going on at the time regarding shooting down the aircraft.
It is my understanding that commercial aircraft do have special transponder frequencies to “announce” a hijacking to ATC and/or the airline’s radio control. But remember that these hijackings were like nothing else before – not for money, ego or escaping to some foreign land. On the contrary, the aircraft were hijacked by trained individuals with just enough knowledge to pilot the aircraft into the ground in a deliberate, controlled crash. It only makes sense they would have knowledge of the emergency transponders and thus thwarted any successful attempts by the doomed pilots to warn anyone.
As to anything gained from 9/11 all I can say is we have made great strides.
However, with friends and family in the airline business from baggage, to security to flying aboard aircraft, I can tell you it is still quite easy to hijack a commercial airliner in the USA, blow one up (be it with a bomb aboard or being shot down out of the sky), and possibly commandeer an aircraft, if not take control of one.
I believe it will happen again. Then we will still have people asking/demanding, “how could this happen again?” I firmly believe we are still being deluded by our government with respect to security, we still cannot believe it ourselves, and we still do not take the notion that terrorism has hit America’s shores.
It will happen again, but the next time around it will be our individual and collective faults for it to succeed.
(Mods - I suggest this thread be moved to GD.)
I don’t know about that, Duckster. Neurodoc is asking for opinions, not an arguement.
More like an IMHO, IMO.
Anyway, the OP is full of inaccuracies, as Duckster points out. But I’m still confused about the details, as are a lot of other people. It seems that the terrorists had quite a bit of luck on their side. The whole thing just doesn’t sit quite right with me.
I’m going to have to give this a little more thought, I guess.
Peace,
mangeorge
The transponder is a little box on the control panel. You can dial in specified frequencies. One of them, 1200, is “VFR flight” that basically tells air traffic control (ATC) that you’re an airplane, track your altitude, direction, and speed, and gives your plane’s license number but states that basically you don’t ask them for any assistance. Airplanes on instrument flight plans are assigned a distinct and unique code, which their transponder then transmits, enabling the system to track that specific flight. Several codes indicate emergency situations, such as loss of radio communications, emergency, and yes, hijacking.
This is easily defeated by turning the transponder OFF. This looks like a transponder failure, which does happen. And from what I’ve heard this is what the hijackers did - they turned off the transponder (they were pilots, after all, they could easily find this device) which makes it look like the plane is having mechanical/electrical problems rather than necessarily hijacked. It bought them a few more minutes to accomplish their plans.
The next question I usually hear after this spiel is “why don’t they make it impossible to turn off the transponders?” Well, that IS a good question I’ll try to answer. First of all, the things DO malfunction from time to time - ATC once told me to turn mine off because it was reporting my altitude as 30,000 feet (it was actually 1500 feet) and airliners were being unnecessarily diverted to avoid a plane that wasn’t there. It was less of a hassle, and possibly safer, to have me flying around without one and reporting my altitude/position/etc every so often than to cruise about with the malfunction. Also, in the event of certain electrical system malfuctions you may need to turn off various pieces of equipment either to prevent or contain a fire. So, while the idea of a tamperproof always-on transponder has a certain appeal it may not, in fact, be the best solution in the long run.
It sounds like it would be better to make it impossible to disable the transponder, and add a new “questionable” code that can be toggled on/off by the pilot. This “questionable” status would flag the aircraft’s readings as unreliable and ignorable by flight controllers. In a hijack situation this code may be turned on by the hijackers, but ground control would know better at some point.
I don’t know about the Bush Administration’s culpability in this matter, but they did issue several general warnings after 9/11 and were criticized for giving the public information that was impossible to act upon.
That someone was planning attacks along the lines of 9/11 should have come as a surprise to no one. They didn’t to me.
A few years back in a conversation with some people, the whole question of terrorism and suicide bombers came up. A sort of game was being played along the lines of “If these people wanted to carry out a spectacular attack on the US to kill a lot of people and cause massive property damage, how could it be done, given that their military capabilities are near zero?”
Everyone agreed that hijacking a fully loaded 747 and crashing it into some center of power in Washington was the most logical act. Ok, so we were wrong about the 747 part, but what do you want from a bunch of guy sitting around drinking beer.
If we would have pursued our line of thought, however, it would have gone something like this:
Ok, so some Islamic fundamentalists want to hijack a plane and fly it into a building. What would they have to do to accomplish this? Which planes would they likely hijack? Well, hijacking a plane is not that difficult, as has been proved in the past, but then you have to fly the damn thing. You need either ex-military pilots or you need to learn to fly yourself. Bingo!
Get our friends in the Egyptian and Saudi intelligence services on the horn. “Say, do you have any information of any ex-pilots dabbling in the extreme fundamentalist movement?” “No, ok, goodbye.”
Ok, then, so these nutcases have to learn to fly themselves. Well, no shit! I wonder how they could do that. “Say, how about if we check out all those flight schools for people of middle eastern extaction who have not apparent business learning how to fly.”
Now, you see where this is going. If the FBI, CIA, DIA NSA and god-know-what-other-IA with their tens of billions of dollars and their armies of analysts can’t put together a better scenario than a bunch of doper-types having a couple of cold ones after work, something is radically wrong.
I can’t imagine why there are some people in positions of power in Washington who are still in possession of their heads.
My OP was just looking for info, and I thank you for the responses, esp. Duckster. I don’t know Jack S*** about ATC or flying planes. And as I said, I don’t believe that Bush had any real idea about what these bastards were up to. In fact, I’m offended by the suggestions of Barbara Boxer et al. that he knew and did nothing.
But I am still amazed that three of the planes were apparently up in the air and allowed to fly into the WTC and Pentagon, after they had been clearly hijacked for more than 30 minutes…
Forgive me for being simple-minded and ignorant about this. In this day and age with instantaneous radio communications (automatic telemetry and otherwise) between airliners and ground monitoring stations, it seems AMAZING that 4 planes were flying around for such a long time without any apparent reaction from ATC and the military. Especially after the first errant plane hit its intended target? To put it simply, what the hell happened to prevent the second and third planes from being intercepted before they crashed into their second and thrid targets? That was the gist of my OP, and I still haven’t gotten a satisfying answer.
Neurodoc, on 9/11 I was walking out the door when Karl Castle came on NPR and stated that a light twin-engined plane had crashed into the WTC. Think about it, just moments after the first plane had hit, there was confusion (at least in the media) as to what kind of plane it was that had hit the WTC. Did you see the footage of the guys standing casually on the ground near the WTC, chatting when the second plane suddenly slams into the WTC? It was at that moment when people realized that it wasn’t an accident.
Everyone was suddenly confronted with an entirely new situation. It doesn’t matter how well trained they were or how intelligent they might have been, the enemy had the element of surprise on their hand. The hesitation that must have occured before the fighter jets were scrambled was what the terrorists were counting on. They knew what was happening, the rest of the world did not. The whole event was a carefully practiced and rehearsed operation, timed to occur as nearly as simultainiously as possible. The rest of us had to guess and wonder as to what was going on and why.
Don’t forget that many people claim that the jet which crashed in Pennsylvania was in reality shot down by the USAF because shortly after the plane went down, the interceptor jets showed up. Patton himself once said that it is always better to attack than to dig in. Because if you’re attacking that means that the enemy can’t attack you.
There are people who work in the airline industry who say that the air traffic controllers are under-trained and over-worked. If true, that’s another factor which played into the terrorists hands. Could we have reacted better to the events as they were unfolding? Sure, but too often we think that real life should be like the movies where everything always goes right for the good guys. It doesn’t. And it doesn’t even in the movies sometimes.
But before September 11 it wasn’t even remotely Standard Operating Procedure to shoot down hijacked airliners. In fact, the idea would have been rejected as shocking and horrible. Before 9/11, most hijackings ended with most or all of the passengers being released (after having been flown to Beirut or someplace like that). Even given that the authorities were beginning to figure out that this was a case of multiple hijackings (and 30 minutes really isn’t that long a time in which to make literally life-or-death decisions involving hundreds of innocent airline passengers), their initial thoughts would run towards making contact with the hijackers, figuring out what they wanted, and what negotiating stance to adopt when the inevitable demands came in (landing and refueling for the planes, release of this or that jailed fellow terrorist, etc., etc., etc.).
Now of course our reaction to the hijacking of an airliner would be very different from what it was then. In fact, the world’s reaction to hijackings began changing very quickly after the first plane hit. It only took a few hours for everyone to begin learning the lessons of this new and more terrible form of hijacking. The fourth plane didn’t make it to its target. No other group of passengers had ever staged an uprising against hijackers, putting the flight in grave danger of crashing immediately (as, unfortunately, did happen) in order to try and regain control of the plane–because no other group of hijacked passengers had been in a situation where they reasoned (correctly) that there was no chance of their being rescued or released, that their captors had no intention of negotiating, and that they were as good as dead anyway if they did cooperate and sit tight, the way people in seemingly similar situations in the past had always been told to do.
When the first airplane hit the WTC the assumption by many was that it was an accident - after all, who flies delibrately into a building? And the Empire State building had a bomber accidently fly into it during WWII, so there was precedent for a New York skyscraper to get hit accidently. I assumed it was a small, private plane - airliners just don’t get that lost, especially on day with conditions pilots call “severe clear” (just about as perfect a day as you can get for flying. To be honest, I had seriously considered playing hookey from work and going up myself).
Even if the airplane was known to be hijacked, pre-Sept 11 the assumption would be that it was still an accident since pre-Sept 11 hijackers demanded things like money, not death. If ATC was tracking the plane all that they would see was that the airplane’s blip had just disappeard - and since radar is line-of-sight that could happen if the plane passed behind a building from the radar’s viewpoint, or if any significant obstacle comes between the radar and the object viewed. Since the transponder was turned off, that blip would be harder to track than an airplane with a working transponder - the controller might spend a precious few seconds or even minutes trying to determine if he/she had simply lost track of the untagged blip or if it had really dropped off the screen.
(Pre-Sept 11 you could arrange to visit an air traffic control facility, and I’ve been up in a couple different towers. The hijackers probably took the tour, too - it used to be encouraged as part of pilot training. The idea was that pilots could use the system more effectively if they understood better how it worked and how things looked to the controllers. Maybe it was too effective an education in some cases. Post-Sept 11 no more tours)
In other words, except, possibly, for a very few individuals, everyone assumed the first impact was an accident.
It was not until the second airplane hit the towers that anyone realized it was not an accident.
After the initial shock wore off my husband he ran into our “laboratory” and turned on the aviation band scanner. His wife (that’s me) works in downtown Chicago with all those skyscrapers and he was understandably concerned. After the second impact but before the Pentagon got hit someone made a decision and ordered every airplane out of the air. He said that the message to land immediately went out pretty much simultaneously on all frequencies.
It was actually a pretty smart thing to do - those who obey are obviously not hijacked. And by getting the traffic out of the air it made it MUCH easier to track the transponderless blips that were the Bad Guys. Also, by halting further take-offs we might have prevented further planned hijackings.
So, despite appearances, action was taken very soon after the second impact. And I think it is truly remarkable that so many pilots, from professional all the way down to student, were able to land so many planes in so short a time, often at locations they were completely unfamillar with, with NO accidents whatsoever. This was not an emergency any of us had ever planned or trained for.
A word about that “instantaneous radio communications (automatic telemetry and otherwise) between airliners and ground monitoring stations” you mentioned - what, exactly, do you think that is? Yes, planes have radios - but everyone has to share frequencies. If someone doesn’t respond is it because they are ignoring you, or did someone else’s transmission interfere with their reception? (happens all the time). Yes, the transponder does provide ATC with information - but the transponders were turned off in the hijacked planes, making them harder to track. As far as I know, there isn’t any “automatic telemetry” transmitting to “ground stations” on any airliner (though I’ll confess I’m not an expert on those planes) So far as I know, it’s just the radio, transponder, and the black boxes (which are in the plane).
Now, as to why the military couldn’t intercept planes #3 and 4 – airliners are pretty fast, capable of 500+ mph. It’s hard to catch something that fast. You gotta get the airforce guys into their planes and up into the air - and that takes a certain number of minutes - then fly to intercept an object moving hundreds of miles an hour that’s already hundreds of miles away. Apparently, it just wasn’t possible to launch fighters quickly enough, which is why we moved to airborne patrols after Sept 11 - the fighter has to be already in the air to have a chance of catching one of these jets.
I don’t see how the air traffic control system could have responded other than it did, or any faster than it did. I was a little surprised the military couldn’t intercept, but only a little.
The “undertrained” rumor started after the air controller strike/firing of the early 80’s - and certainly the initial crop hired to replace the strikers was undertrained. But folks, that was 20 years ago. A lot of those initial hires have either retired or moved on. The current crop are as well trained as any controllers have ever been.
Overworked? At times, yes. Certainly the morning of Sept 11 they were. You have to realize - there were tens of thousands of airplanes over North America at that point in time. As a rule of thumb, for every commercial airliner up on a day like that there are five other non-airliner planes also up in the sky. Everyone was ordered to land at the nearest airport that could accomodate their plane. That means a LOT of interrupted trips and many more people landing at one time than we’ve ever seen before, many at fields without control towers to assist with the traffic control. In addition to telling everyone to get on the ground, and arguing with folks who don’t know what’s going on (they’re flying, not listening to CNN) and who don’t want to cooperate, they’re still having to keep airplanes from occupying the same space at the same time, giving directions, and handing out information to pilots who need info on unfamillar landing spots. It was complete chaos up there for several hours. Again, I don’t think enough recognition has been made of the fact that we grounded every plane over the United States in about two hours with NO accidents whatsoever, with everyone making up the gameplan as they went along.
Do you seriously think a bunch of “undertrained” people - either controllers or pilots - would be able to pull that off?
Psst!, Broomstick it was me who said that people were claiming that the ATCs were undertrained/overworked. No insult was meant by that, either. Those folks did a remarkable job in getting the planes out of the air in a short period of time. I was merely throwing out another possibility that could have aided the terrorists in their goals.
One has to wonder what would have happened had the terrorists launched their attacks a few years ago when airports were having problems with their radar going out on them.
Oh, so sorry Tucker and Neurodoc! I was trying to bang out that post before leaving for work and got in too much of a hurry!
And what makes you think the radar situation is entirely fixed? Some improvements have been made, but a large factor is that the volume of traffic has not returned to Sept 10 levels (yet).
I did read yesterday on the BBC website that England’s ATC crashed in a major way. So it’s not just us having problems. The public wants to fly more and the system has growing pains.
Truth is - on a day with the weather conditions like 9/11 had radar is not as essential as it would have been had the weather been bad. With the skies clear the pilots can do quite a bit of the work of pacing traffic arriving at a location for the simple reason they can see each other. In poor visibility the pilots rely a great deal on ATC to keep from crashing into each other.
Is it true that bomb threats were called into one or more ATC stations on the Eastern Seaboard on Sept. 11? I heard this at the time, but can’t find a confirmation.
If so, this points up to another deliberate attempt to minimize preparedness until it was too late.
As for ideas that the U.S. government knew an attack of this scale was imminent and did nothing to stop it, just for political reasons: if you’re going to wear a tinfoil hat, try getting one that’s not so tight it cuts off what little circulation your brain is getting.
What’s sad about all of this is that the 2nd plane to hit the WTT’s came very, very close to missing it’s intended target completely. I’m not trying to say that the plane wouldn’t have hit another building, but I don’t think it would have caused nearly as much damage.
